Myths of Creation

By Philip Freund

An exploration of mythology, religious belief, and scientific theory on the origins of the universe.   A classic study of mythology, this examination investigates stories from all continents and ageswith all their startling similarities and contraststo reveal the workings of the human mind and imagination. Philip Freund provides revealing insight into the universality of ideas and faith by examining a wide range of texts such as the Old Testament, the Upanishads, and Gilgamesh in his search for parallels between creation fables. The analysis estimates, for example, that more than 500 flood legends have been told by more than 250 tribes and peoples from around the world. Also featured are clear presentations of the theories of towering figures such as Freud, Jung, Frazer, Campbell, and Malinowski who have proposed variously that myths are primitive history based on literal fact, a means of expressing profound tribal wisdom and psychological and sexual truth, or that they represent a search for kinship with the animal and vegetable world. Fascinating and erudite, this revered book ranks among the select handful of core texts in any mythology collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780720618051

Book preview

1

A GENESIS

Some thirty years ago and more, when I was enrolled at a university, I studied astronomy. One night each week I went to a little domed observatory that stood on a knoll, and afterward on cold winter nights I walked back to the campus and my dormitory room, along a path through woods beside a frozen lake. Like everyone else, I found it exciting to gaze through a telescope at the moon and the rings of Saturn. Even more thrilling was that snowy walk back from our evening class. Overhead the stars burned with frosty clarity in the winter sky and the crisp and sometimes stinging air. I was eighteen, and when I looked up at the white points of light in the dark sky, a sense of poetic wonder flooded my mind. This was very close in feeling, I’m sure, to the primitive sense of wonder of a child or savage, peering heavenward, with all the world and night about him empty and still.

An astronomy course consists of more than trips to an observatory; our professor chalked abstruse mathematics on the blackboard, and there were excursions into physics with which a youthful intelligence was hardly able to cope. But the ingenuity of astronomers greatly impressed me, as did their staggering statistics. It is not without cause that we speak of any very large figure as astronomical.

A young man who sat alongside me in class was a good mathematician and often helped to explain the complex equations to me. He was quiet, well behaved, serious in aspect. Often we walked back together from class across the glistening, snowy campus. One day I spoke with enthusiasm and respect of the lecture we had just heard, on the origin of the solar system.

He smiled. Yes, it’s all very interesting. But of course I don’t believe any of it.

What do you mean? Everything I was told in the classroom, I accepted without question.

I’m a Christian. I read the Bible, and I believe what’s written there.

That God created the world in six days?

I learned that my friend was deeply religious. He hoped to go to a theological seminary and afterward become a missionary in distant Africa. This was in the days when a religious movement called Fundamentalism was popular in America. The Fundamentalists believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible; indeed, at their urging, a science teacher named Scopes in Tennessee had been removed from his class and fined for having taught that man was descended from monkeys. The findings of science were heresies to such orthodox religionists. If my friend belonged to them, that in itself was not too startling.

But how could he sit beside me in an astronomy class and follow the blackboard demonstrations, and peer through a telescope, and yet not believe anything he heard from our professor? Every time I saw my friend taking notes on the lectures, I asked myself that. To me, his attitude was highly irrational.

At the end of the term, when we wrote our final examination, I barely won a passing grade, but my unbelieving friend—due to his mathematical skill—had the highest mark in the class.

Our professor had no inkling that his best student was a quiet skeptic. My friend’s religious faith continued to puzzle me. How could anyone be exposed to the dazzling proofs of science and yet close his eyes to them?

At eighteen, I thought that the theory presented in our astronomy class was the truth, and that my friend’s belief, the Biblical one, was mere fantasy. It should have given me pause, however, that the theory propounded in college was not the one I had learned in high school, only three or four years earlier. My high school teacher had told us about the Laplace nebular hypothesis to account for the origin of the earth and the solar system; whereas now, in college, I was being given the Chamberlin-Moulton planetesimal hypothesis.

If the Laplace hypothesis was no longer scientifically sound, in what respect was it different from a myth?

II

It happened more recently, perhaps fifteen years ago, that I had occasion to read the Hindu Brihadāranyaka-Upanishad in Yeats’s splendid translation. In it, I came across this vivid tale of the origin of life:

As a lonely man is unhappy, God was unhappy. He wanted a companion. He was as big as man and wife together; He divided Himself into two, husband and wife were born.

God said: Man is only half himself; his wife is the other half.

They joined and mankind was born.

She thought: He shall not have me again; he has created me from himself; I will hide myself.

She then became a cow, he became a bull; they were joined and cattle were born. She became a mare, he a stallion; she became a she-ass, he an ass; they joined and the hoofed animals were born. She became a she-goat, he a goat; she became a ewe, he a ram; they joined and goats and sheep were born. Thus He created everything down to ants, male and female.

He put His hand into His Mouth, and there created fire as if He were churning butter. He knew that He was this creation; that He created it from Himself; that He was the cause. Who knows, finds creation joyful.

When they say: Sacrifice to this or that god, they talk of separate gods; but all gods are created by Him, and He is all gods.

Whatever is liquid He created from His seed. Every-thing in this world is eater or eaten. The seed is food and fire is eater.

He created the gods; created mortal men, created the immortals. Hence this creation is a miracle. He who knows, finds this miracle joyful.

This world was everywhere the same till name and shape began; then one could say: He has made such a name and such a shape. Even today everything is made different by name and shape.

Later in this book, I should like to refer to that Hindu tale and analyze it in some small measure, in the light of what we shall have learned about the significance of myths. We shall not be able to probe it fully, but in part, at least; and I am certain that we shall discover something about ourselves in so doing.

Most of us contrast in our mind only two stories of the creation, the Biblical one and the scientific one. We assume that one or the other is right. Either my friend the Fundamentalist had the answer, or my professor of astronomy had it.

But it occurred to me, as I read the lively yet allegorically profound tale in the Brihadāranyaka-Upanishad, that mankind provides many other stories of creation besides the Old Testament one.

I became curious about the creation myths of other religions and races, the tales of how the world began. Whenever possible, I took note of them. I was fascinated by the myths because of their poetic quality and accordingly collected them for my own pleasure. Of all kinds of primitive and natural poetry, this particular myth-subject has the most grandeur and scope and seems to be chronologically at the very start of man’s speculations.

Here is a tale of the Shilluk, a tall and stately race in the African Sudan:

In the beginning was Jo-Uk, the Great Creator, and he made the Sacred White Cow. Out of the Nile that Cow came up. The White Cow gave birth to a man child whom she called Kola, whose grandson was Ukwa. Ukwa took two wives, dark virgins who also rose out of the holy river. One of Ukwa’s sons, Nyakang, a tall blue-black warrior, went south to the marshes of the Upper Nile; there he founded the Shilluk nation and became its first ret, or ruler, and a demigod. All this happened when the world was new, about four hundred years ago.

Then I came upon this story of the beginning recounted by an Andean race, the Aymara people of Pacajes in Bolivia:

The Snow God Kun destroyed all life on earth. Only the cruel supaya—devils—dared to roam the thin air of the icy highlands. This happened ages and ages ago. Then the Fertility Gods, the Pacha Camaj, sent down their very own sons, the Eagle Men. They created a new race of people, to take the place of those who had been snowed under by the angry Kun. The children of the Eagle Men, the Paka-Jakes, settled on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where they are today.

These myths sound very unlike, yet one begins to discern strange patterns in them…and from this a new curiosity entered my search. All the origin myths, though from scattered regions, have haunting similarities. How to account for that?

I think that a study of myths for their own sake would be an idle affair, a species of dilettantism, for which I have neither the time nor the temperament. What held my interest, almost from the very start, was the hint that I might learn something fundamental and permanent about the mind of man—about myself—by contemplating mythology, and especially man’s always daring stories of the beginning.

As my pleasure continued, and my hope for this quest sharpened, I finally began to think of creating a character in a novel, whose interest would parallel my own—an anthropologist who would be a collector of creation myths—and I finally did this in my philosophical romance, The Volcano God, which has outraged some of the more conservative critics. To prepare for the novel, my search for material became more systematic. Later I was also convinced that I should write a separate book about my findings, to develop my ideas and guesses further than the fictional form allows. I am not an anthropologist. Instead, I am a poet and novelist venturing into a special field, which, by the nature of his calling, is akin to his own. Any storyteller is something of a mythmaker.

What follows is a voyage of exploration which is serious and, in my opinion, important. I have greatly enjoyed compiling this book, because it is filled with poetry and color, articulated in some of the world’s most superb allegory. Early man’s gift for fantasy is astounding. One never ceases to wonder at it. And, so far as I know, this is the first time that so many creation stories have been brought together in one volume. But to share my delight in this spontaneous poetry is not my only purpose. How does man’s mind work? Where can we look to find a clue more clearly than here? In these stories we can see how man reasoned when he looked at the world and first tried to explain it to himself. Let us examine his answers, his earliest and latest attempts at understanding the universe, not only in primitive myth but in recent science. In what ways do they vary? Or is man’s explanation always very much the same? If there are fixed modes of thought, which have lasted since the beginning of humankind, an exciting prospect is open to us: we can learn a bit more of how we think, by an analysis of these creation epics, and thus further increase our store of self-knowledge.

2

FIRE AND DELUGE

According to some Australian aboriginals, Old Man Pundyil opened the door of the Sun; thereupon a stream of fire poured down upon mankind.

The Eskimos tell a similar story. At the time of the great blaze, the waters of the Arctic Ocean became so hot that they finally evaporated.

Savage man’s imagination is cruelly vivid. But that reflects—or symbolizes—the daily danger of his existence, the threat of natural accident.

The Ipurinas, a tribe in northwestern Brazil, relate that long ago the Earth was overwhelmed by a hot flood. This took place when the Sun, a caldron of boiling water, tipped over.

The Yurucaré, of Bolivia, say that Aymasuñe, the demon, was responsible for the fall of fire from heaven. Everything below died: bushes, creatures, the human race. Only one man, who had foreseen what might happen, had provided food and shelter for himself in a cave. When the fire hail began, he hid himself there. Now and then, to learn if the fire still raged, he held a long stick out of the mouth of his cave. On two occasions it came back charred, but the third time it was cool. Still cautious, however, he kept himself safe four more days before venturing out. And then, the sole survivor, he beheld a dreadful sight. The whole forest was ashes, the rivers and springs had boiled away, the very mountains were blackened.

These are not creation myths, but catastrophe myths. But they are a necessary background for the creation stories and nearly always coupled with them. They tell of a terrible fire, both cosmic and earthly.

In Hindu mythology, creation is destroyed at the end of each Kalpa, or day of Brahma, by flames belched forth from the fangs of Sesha, the serpent. Some savants have interpreted this as referring to the appearance of a blazing comet. In the ancient Babylonian epic which describes the adventures of Gilgamesh of Erech, we learn of a fire rain spread by the Anunnaki, who rush across the heavens with their torches aloft. The Anunnaki are underworld spirits and might have escaped from spouting volcanoes.

When we leap from the Eskimos and the Yurucaré to the Hindus and Babylonians, we are turning abruptly from savage story to highly sophisticated myth. But for our purpose at the moment that makes little difference, since we are merely stressing the universality of certain themes in all ages and places.

The Greeks have the famous fable of Phaethon, Apollo’s son, who extracted from his father a promise to let him drive the Chariot of the Sun. The youth could not hold the reins tightly enough and, zigzagging through the sky, scorching the constellations, almost destroyed our planet. Clouds vanished; Libya became a desert. The Nile, in terror, hid below the earth, where its head still is; the Ethiopians were blackened for all time. The molten landscape was changed; mountains were heated and burst into flame. Only the intervention of Zeus, toppling the unhappy Phaëthon by a well-aimed thunderbolt, saved the world from a crisped end.

Or back to savages again:

The Washo Indians, in California, have a legend about a terrible volcanic upheaval. So great was the heat of the blazing mountains that the very stars melted and fell.

In the Northern Urals, the nomadic Voguls recount the story of a holy fire flood which swept over the earth for seven years and consumed almost everything; it even charred the raft of the few men who survived. It was sent by Num Tarem, the Fatherly, as a means of destroying Xulater, the Devil. Yet this fire scourge was in vain, for the indestructible Xulater eluded it.

The catastrophe myth, then, is a universal one.

In many of the stories, the world-wide blaze is caused by man’s theft of fire from the gods. Maui, of the Maoris in New Zealand, was in need of it. His old blind grandmother advised him how he could steal it from Mahu-ika, the giant who guarded the flame. Maui spoke jokingly and tricked the giant into wrestling with him. With magical words, Maui hurled Mahu-ika into the air time and again, until at last the giant fell head foremost and broke his neck. Maui quickly cut off Mahu-ika’s head and seized the precious flame, but it was new to him and got away and the world began to burn. Maui and his wily old grandmother were endangered. The Fire Thief jumped into the ocean, but even the salt water was boiling. He raised his voice to Ua, the Rain God, but in vain, for the fire burned on. He pleaded with Nganga the Sleet God; with the Storm Gods Apu-hau and Apu-matangi; he sought the help of the God of Hailstorms Whatu; but none of them could prevail. The ocean was nearly gone. Only when all the gods, joining together, let all their deluges pour down at the same time, was the world fire quenched.

The Tuleyome Indians, of California, tell of Wekwek, the falcon, who stole fire but lost it from beneath his wings in flight. It set the world aflame. The Yana Indians, nearby, also have a fire-stealing myth; five men were sent to obtain the treasure, but on their way back the Coyote, who had offered to carry the fire, dropped it, and instantly it blazed around them. The rocks glowed with heat, the waters evaporated, a dense pall hung over everything, and the very existence of Earth was threatened.

The Fire Thief, indeed, is a figure shared by many races. He may be the better-known Prometheus; or he may be the Irish Prince of the Lonesome Island, who bore away a flame from the well of the Queen of Tubber Tintye. In the lore of the Hassidic Jews, too, is preserved the story of man dangerously discovering fire and letting it escape his grasp.

The myth of the world-wide blaze is often accompanied by the story of a deluge, a fearful cloudburst or sudden tidal wave, which quenches the fire; or else the deluge appears alone as the catastrophe which engulfs the Earth. The Fire Thief is called by anthropologists the Culture Hero. If he is not the Fire Thief, the Culture Hero is the Deluge Survivor. When all others perish, this Hero escapes. The best-known Deluge Survivor is Noah, but mythology is filled with hundreds of other figures like him.

Nichant, the hero of the Gros Ventres, swims while holding onto a buffalo horn. Rock, the bold ancestor of the Arapaho Indians, fashions himself a boat of fungi and spiderwebs. The lone progenitor of the Annamese saves himself in a tom-tom. The hero of the Ahoms in Burma uses a gigantic gourd which, by magical intervention, providentially grows out of a little seed. Trow, of the Tringus Dyaks of Borneo, is tossed on the waters in a trough; as is the heroine of the Toradjas of Celebes, though hers is—most unromantically—a swill trough. The ancestors of the Chané of Bolivia find refuge in an earthenware pot that floats.

One compilation shows that there are over five hundred deluge myths, belonging to over two hundred and fifty peoples or tribes. The Cashinaua of Western Brazil tell of a great flood, as do the Makusi of British Guiana and the Caribs of Central America. When a dove brought back a willow twig, the Mandan Indians of Dakota learned that the inundation was subsiding.

Other North American tribes as far apart as the Salinan and Chimariko Indians of California and the Crees of Manitoba and the Shawnees of Florida have similar stories. So do the Hurons, north of Lake Ontario, and the Algonquins along the St. Lawrence.

In Europe and the Near East, the flood myth is the same. The Lithuanians are saved in a nutshell, which Pramzimas has eaten in heaven and thrown down to give his off-spring, one man and one woman, a chance to escape. Num Tarem spares the Voguls by building them an ark, an iron ship, with a roof of sevenfold sturgeon skin. The Greeks tell of three great floods: Zeus destroys the Race of Bronze by a deluge which only Deukalion and his wife Pyrrha survive. Finally, when the waste of waters lessens, their ark comes to rest on Mount Parnassus. With them, mankind begins its history once more. Other Greek saviors and refugees from floods are Ogygos and Dardanos. The Babylonian deluge story is clearly a prototype of the Hebrew one: Like Noah, Utnapishtim has an ark and releases from it a raven and a dove, to discover if the invading waters have gone.

The Culture Hero, thus, is the founder of the tribe, or perhaps of a new race. He alone—or with a small group of lesser companions—has been saved from the catastrophe by his daring resourcefulness, or because he has been singled out by the gods’ favor.

He also brings with him from an earlier era, before the world-wide disaster, the supremely important secret of fire. He remembers how things were on Earth before. He is the sole inheritor of human knowledge, all that the race has learned through preceding aeons. He seems almost to have come to the Earth from the sky or moon. His appearance to a few huddled tribes in places of refuge, perhaps on a dry mountain top, coincides with or occurs soon after a time of fire and molten rock and clouds of suffocating ash—volcanic outpourings, followed by tidal waves caused by earthquakes—and so he might be blamed for having brought it on by his great boldness or hubris, as are such culture heroes as Maui and Wekwek and the Coyote. But carrying knowledge from the past he is also a light-bringer, a savior, and this too accounts for his identification as the Fire Thief. He has stolen fire from the sky and given it to man.

At night there are shining lights in the vault of heaven; what is more logical than to suppose that fire has originated there?

The moon is the brightest of all objects in the dark sky. The Tolowas say that following a vast flood, only one couple is left on Earth’s highest peak. They shiver in the cold, but the Indians who live in the moon above them have fire aplenty. From the moon, then, a firebrand is brought down.

To the Loucheaux, at the time of a deluge, a godlike man comes from the moon, and later returns there again. Endless numbers of myths relate the adventures of such visitors from the moon. Some stay here; some later go back to their home in the far air.

Fire Thief, Deluge Survivor. The Hero has a third role: he is the Dragon Slayer. The god Indra, the Hebrew angel Michael, and the gods Thraeton, Marduk, and Ra of Persia, Babylonia, and Egypt, and the Greek warrior Cadmus, are all killers of the fabulous beast. So is Siegfried, in the lore of the Teutons; and Beowulf, and Thor. The legends of most races tell of battles between a fearless champion of mankind and a scaly fire-breathing monster. In this suspenseful fight, the Hero has need of a magic weapon, and is miraculously armed. It is amazing how often this incident occurs in world myth; it is found in Celtic stories, the tales of Indonesia.

As universal history unfolds in myth, the Hero takes on a final role and becomes a prophet and instructor. The Bogotá Indians of Colombia report a flood. When it ebbs, Zuhé—a tall, bearded divine messenger—appears from the East. He teaches the stricken people how to till the soil once more, to weave clothes, and to carve altars and honor their gods. The Babylonians speak of Oannes, who comes out of the sea, shining and scaled like a fish. He finds a people who live like beasts. He shows them how to build towns and fair temples, and how to make use of the land, to have it bear them sustaining fruits. Six other heavenly beings follow him with instructive messages for mankind.

The Culture Hero may once have been human, an actual survivor of a catastrophe, or an early and benignly wise leader. Or he might be an idealized projection, a composite figure. As tribal history dissolves into myth or is elaborated by it, he is slowly raised to the rank of demigod. Sometimes he rises to the very top of the hierarchy of gods; he may end his steady process of deification—or enskyment—as the ruling god himself; as, indeed, the creation deity. Osiris, beginning as a Culture Hero, becomes the most loved of Egyptian divinities. The saintly young Indian prince, Gautama, is similarly elevated. So is the Teutonic chieftain, Odin.

Although not all Culture Heroes attain that apotheosis, they are a brilliant company. Chon is the Hero of the Peruvians. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, of the Mexicans. Votan, of the Mayas. Raven, of the Eskimos. Kut-o-yis, of the Blackfoot Indians; and Manzabozho, of the Algonquins; and Water Jar Boy, of the Pueblo Indians. Fu Hsi, Shen Nung, and Huang Ti, of the Chinese. Trow is celebrated by the folklore of Borneo. Besides Prometheus and Deukalion, the Greeks have Palamedes and Cecrops. The Romans, cunning and defiant Aeneas. Finnish myth lauds Väinämöinen and Lemminkainen. The Yakuts, of Siberia, recount the exploits of The White Youth. Finn MacCool and Cuchulainn enliven Irish legendry with their magical deeds. The chivalric and generous acts of King Arthur are recalled by the Welsh and the English. Maui, Siegfried, Muchu-kunda, Oisin. Gilgamesh, Hotu Matua. Each of these, in his biography, illustrates some aspect if not all the details of the same reiterated theme, and frequently his story combines a very large number of them.

Interesting efforts have been made to draw a psychological profile of this popular and ever-shining